Monday, July 17, 2017

What can we say come July 23? 7th after Pentecost

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My strategy this
week will be to have Genesis 28:10-19a and Matthew 13:24-30 read.I will begin with Genesis, and ponder “Surely the Lord was in this place, and I did not know it”
– which is the story of our lives, isn’t it?Here is a sermon
I preached on this 3 years ago.Then I
will explore one of the ways the Lord is present in ways we do not realize or
comprehend – in the church, this field of wheat and tares (more below).We won’t read Romans 8 at my place, but I
will touch on Paul’s image of what it means to call God Abba (more below).

So
first, Genesis 28.Paint the physicality
of the scene: Jacob is in a desolate place, sleeping out of doors, a stone for
his pillow.I may allude to St. Francis
sleeping on rocks and in caves – which he loved doing, believing it put him
closer to God’s most enduring creation, and also in solidarity with Jesus, our ‘rock,’
who slept (or tried to sleep) on that Maundy Thursday night in Caiaphas’s
prison.

I
don’t think it’s eisegeis to speak of finding yourself in a hard place.I envy people like Franklin Roosevelt – who,
as President during the Depression and then World War II, said he did the best
he could all day, then turned in and slept like a baby.I struggle – and so do many of our
people.Can it be that, during such
agonizing, sleepless nights, “the Lord was in this place, but I did not know it”?Psalm 56 says “Lord, you have kept count of my tossings” – in the night,
when God seems absent or silent or both.

Obviously, this
text begs the preacher to use “Surely the Lord was in this place, and I did not
know it” as a cadence, a refrain, repeated at the end of each “move.”

During the
night, Jacob sees a – ramp?This might
be a better translation, but “ladder” works, and is familiar (from “We are
climbing Jacob’s ladder”) – and enjoys the benefit of Thomas Merton’s wisdom
when he said We spend our lives climbing the ladder of success, but then when
we get to the top, we realize the ladder is propped up against the wrong wall.

I’m tempted to
play with an idea that the Church is the ladder, at least for us, the way to
God, or the way angels come down to us.There’s some agitation in that, right, that an angel might show up?Elie Wiesel famously said “If an angel ever
says ‘Be not afraid,’ you’d better watch out: a big assignment is on the way.”

Thomas Traherne,
in the 17th century, declared that the Cross is our ladder from
earth into heaven, from our heart into the heart of God.

Whatever the
ladder, the large point here is that “the Lord was in this place, but I did not
know it.”I love the way God is there
when we aren’t aware, when we aren’t praying or seeking God at all.I wrote something of a memoir called Struck From Behind: My Memories of God.It’s
not a dull account of my career or life, but a collection of memories, of ways
God was there when I didn’t realize it at the time, but only in retrospect,
years later (playing on Thoreau's "Truth strikes us from behind, and in the dark").I love inviting people into
this kind of exercise:think back in the
memory of your life.Where was God when
you didn’t seek God or realize at the time God was there?A preacher could play with this one all day.

If you delve into
memory, you find family weirdness – or most of us do.Notice God doesn’t say to Jacob “I am your
God,” but rather “I am the God of your father, and your father’s father…”A premise of Peter Scazzero’s wonderful Emotionally
Healthy Spirituality (which we did as a whole
series with videos, books and emails – and I’d commend this to you and your
church) is that we are never healed or one with God until we probe our family
history and discover who’s there and what therefore we carry around
inside:trace your family tree and you
find horse thieves, alcoholics, workaholics, philanderers, depression, strains
of cancer or heart disease.We don’t
mind inheriting family money – but inheriting family depression or health or
personal issues?It’s all there – and “surely
the Lord was even in that place, although we did not know it.”

If the Lord is
in such places, even when we are unaware, then we are invited into the other
great prayer Merton offered:whatever
the circumstances, whatever happens, “Lord, let this be my consolation – that wherever
I am, You are loved.”

God may as well
be loved, for God is our Father, our Abba.Romans 8: the heart of it is that Jesus’ surprising and alluring habit
of addressing God as Abba, Father, is picked up by Paul.It isn’t that you just decide, Oh, I’ll call
God Abba.It is the Spirit that enables
and empowers this “cry” (so it’s a plea for help?).It’s not the word Abba that carries any magic;
it’s the deep sense of the intimate relationship.We are children of God, no small thing… and
then heirs (getting better…) – but then Paul has to add “provided we suffer
with him.”Not “in case, by some remote
chance, we suffer.”

But I’m
planning, for the second half or third third of my sermon, to think of a way
the Lord is present and we do not realize or understand it:in the life of the church, broken and riddled
with lunacy as it may be.Matthew
13, the wheat & the tares:I hope that the scholars who say the
‘interpretation’ in 36-43 doesn’t emanate from Jesus but is spin from early
church leaders are correct.Jesus’
lovely, realistic, merciful parable is twisted into something ominous and
threatening.The question in Jesus’
simple, unexplained parable isn’t Am I wheat? Or tares?You’re both, of course – The story is about
the community, the people of God.The
Church is wheat, and tares, both, and we like to think we know who’s who, as if
you could simply put a sticker on each person’s nametag so we could accurately
identify who’s who.Tares?Sit in the back on the left… Wheat?Up front, on the right…

Robert Farrar Capon points out, "This is no way to run a farm. Maybe Jesus was just not as good a gardener as he was a carpenter... Programs designed to get rid of evil are doomed to do exactly what the farmer suggests they will do. Since good and evil commonly inhabit not only the same field but even the same individual human beings, the only result of a dedicated campaign to get rid of evil will be the abolition of literally everybody." He suggests that the devil's best strategy is to sucker good people into taking up arms against one another, while he sits back and laughs.

Churches divide –
grieving Jesus’ heart, who prayed for unity on the last night of his life (John
17), and still does.I’d commend my
blog on why unity is required of us as United Methodists; all churches tend
to want to separate wheat and tares, which Jesus said we keep them together.

Francis
Schaeffer, the godfather of evangelicalism, wrote about the way we fail to love
within the church: Christians “rush in, being very,
very pleased to find other men’s mistakes. We build ourselves up by tearing
other men down.” We are to exercise love in even the toughest situations
– the obligation of “loving our brothers when it costs us something, loving
them even under times of tremendous emotional tension, loving them in a way the
world can see.”

Ephraim Radner,
in his dense but wonderful A Brutal Unity,
speaks of the solidarity to which we are called: “Solidarity
is about giving oneself over to another across an otherwise entrenched and
immovable boundary… In doing this, we confront the ‘otherness’ of God even in
the otherness of” the one from whom we are separated.”

I love this
scene in Stephen Bransford's novel, Riders of the Long Road. Silas Will, a circuit rider back in the 18th century, was grilled with hard questions by a young man about God, evil and suffering. His response?

"'God sees much more than we see. He sees the beginning and the end of things and He is doing what is best from all that He sees. God would never kill a child. But there is an invisible war that goes on around us while we live here on earth. God promised to destroy the Devil.' The young man asked, 'Why won't God finish it now?' Silas was thoughts for a moment, and then suddenly leaped up, bent over with excitement. 'They asked Christ the same question. Look here, watch down here.' He bent over. 'Christ said the Kingdom is like a sower who sowed good seed, but in the night his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat. See, here are the good grasses' - his hands stroked the grass - 'and this pennyroyal here is like the weed.' One hand closed upon a large mint-leaves pennyroyal stem. 'Look at it, and look what happens when I pull it out.' Silas yanked the pennyroyal up by the roots. It exploded from the ground, showering both of them with dirt from its spreading roots. 'This is what Christ said. The people urged Him to pluck all the weeds from the wheat field, but He said, no, let them grow together because to pull them out now will destroy much innocent wheat. See the grasses that have died here because I pulled up the pennyroyal? We know pennyroyal roots grow under ground, tangled beneath the other grasses. God knows the roots of evil grown around every sickness since Adam and Eve. Yes, God can purge the world of sin and death right now, but He doesn't because all have sinned and we are all so tangled with the corruption of sin that He would destroy us and the whole world in that selfsame moment. What kind of God could do that?'"

{the image of Jacob's ladder is one of several painted by Marc Chagall}************************************

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About Me

I’m pastor of Myers Park United Methodist Church in Charlotte, NC, and I also teach preaching and ministry at Duke Divinity School as an adjunct. I write regular inspirational/ educational pieces you’ll find here, reviews of books pertinent to faith today and ministry, and I love to be part of conversations about life with God and in the world among Christians and clergy.